Category Archives: NeoPixel

LEGO Batman Clock Hack

Holy Batman

Inspired by Dan Aldred‘s LEGO Clock hacks (http://www.tecoed.co.uk/darth-beats.html and http://www.tecoed.co.uk/yoda-tweets.html) I picked up a broken Batman clock from eBay for some hacking shenanigans.  I had several aims, based on the great work of Dan before me

  • Add a Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD, which would allow both text and graphics to be displayed
  • Attempt to retain the existing button board
  • See if the on board piezo was usable
  • Light the white eyes behind the cowl

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ISS Tracker

The blame for this little project can be firmly placed at the door of @SouthendRPiJams (aka Andy) after I signed up to be an Exhibitor at the Southend Raspberry Jam on 21st Feb.  He dropped me a DM and the conversation went like this

SRJ:

We’re doing Astropi this jam but the HAT won’t be out.  If you could show some of the equivalent AstroPi hardware and code working to help give people ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

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A #CheerLights Virtual Christmas Tree

What is #CheerLights?

Cheerlights is a IoT based light control system, originally intended to allow social media to dictate the colour of festive lights around the world.


The current cheerlight status

How does it work?

Put the word Cheerlight and a colour in a tweet and you’ve just told light systems around the world the colour they should show.  On the website is a list of the currently supported colours.

On the back-end there is a feed aggregator which exposes a JSON, TXT or XML API. Continue reading

Word Clock with a Unicorn

A few days back I saw this article about a Word Clock that had been built using at ATmega328P and an 8×8 LED matrix. “Cool” I thought, I have bi-colour one of those in the “toy” box, I might have a go at that.

Around the same time, those pesky pirates Pimoroni were having their #yarrbooty twitter competition. I was fortunate enough to win a few rounds and decided to spend some of my booty on a Unicorn HAT and an A+. The Unicorn HAT is an 8×8 matrix of very bright RGB LEDs.

And low, the Unicorn Word Clock was born Continue reading